Dive Brief:
- General Mills is tapping Gawker Media’s Kotaku gaming vertical in search of millennial gamers.
- The campaign, which is based on the Honey Nut Cheerios brand, is Kotaku’s first sponsored series.
- Videos for the campaign began running in early September and have already passed 200,000 viewers on the Kotaku website.
Dive Insight:
Gawker Media entered the sponsored video series with a campaign on its gaming vertical, Kotaku, promoting the General Mills cereal brand Honey Nut Cheerios. The four-part series is called “Compete” and is about telling the story of gamers rather simply playing games.
"[General Mills] had expressed strong interest in reaching out to millennial gamers," Paul Sundue, executive director of Studio@Gawker, told Adweek, adding, "We really think [telling stories about gamers] differentiates these videos."
The campaign launched Sept. 10 with the first video in the series and has already surpassed 200,000 viewers on the Kotaku website, which gets around 12 million monthly visitors. Kotaku Editor-in-Chief Stephen Totilo said, "More arrangements like this will make more of this kind of work possible."
Gawker is already expanding its sponsored video series with a Gillette promotion on Adequate Man, an offshoot of its sports-related vertical Deadspin.